"We block them!" is the obvious response. Masto lets both #mastoadmins and users block/silence both individuals and instances. And that’s good for now. But what’s gonna happen when we’re big enough to get large scale attacks?

Should admins be automatically alerted if multiple folks on their instance start blocking a person? Or an instance? Or if, say, five different people on your instance blocked five different people from badactor.donuts? Hell, maybe you want to automatically defederate with badactor.donuts when that happens, and tell the admin so they can rescind the block when they get a chance to investigate.

This is hopefully a long way away from happening. But it feels like a thing we should start thinking about. How do we give people who are running an instance as a hobby the tool to quickly detect and deal with attacks?

(This probably also goes with my musings on "friend" instances potentially watching what each other block, and alerting their admin/autoblocking when enough friends are blocking the saame thing. It’s kind of the same idea on a lower level.)